Ahmadinejad in a Quake: Method in His Madness?

posted at 2:44 pm on April 19, 2010 by J.E. Dyer
[ Nuclear Proliferation ]   

Iranian news agencies have been reporting lately the musings of Iran’s leading lights on earthquakes.  Hot Air regulars will recognize yesterday’s report about a senior cleric proclaiming that “dolled-up women,” who lead to extramarital sex, lead thereby to earthquakes.  So gals, get back under the chador and stay there.

But the cleric’s comments came in the wake of an alarmist pronouncement by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week that more than a third of the population of the Tehran metro needs to move away, because of the threat of earthquakes.

Michael Ledeen noticed this report in connection with another from Fars News, conveying the assurance of a top Iranian nuclear official that Iran would become a nuclear power “in the next month.”  It got him to thinking that maybe Ahmadinejad’s sudden alarm over earthquakes is related to a fear of nuclear attack on Iran, presumably by Israel.

What that got me thinking was that sounding the alarm in advance about possible earthquakes would be a method of “prepping the information battlespace,” to try and pass off an underground nuclear test as an earthquake.  Seismic indications can be somewhat ambiguous if an underground detonation is small enough, as scientists have seen with detections from North Korea and China.  Of course, the idea that Iranian scientists can predict an earthquake – with sufficient confidence to warrant public musings about moving 5 million people out of the danger zone – is absurd.  But it’s not necessarily out of sync with the narrative in Ahmadinejad’s head.

Because there’s more to this tale.  Readers will remember that back in January, after the earthquake in Haiti, Hugo Chavez, that noted Venezuelan seismologic expert, announced that a secret American weapon had caused the quake.  Venezuelan TV ran a whole news segment on an alleged notification from Russia’s Northern Fleet about this.  The Northern Fleet, you see, has been watching developments in the Caribbean like a hawk, following the reconstitution of the US Fourth Fleet there.  (This makes hilarious reading.)

Alert readers will recall as well that Chavez and Ahmadinejad are best buds.  So it’s no surprise to discover that Iran’s news outlets trumpeted the same story (complete with the marvelous reference to the tip-off from the Russian Northern Fleet).  Russian news organs picked it up too, making one wonder about the credulity index in Russia’s literate population.  But that’s another topic.

Put on your tinfoil hats, kids.  It turns out there’s a whole conspiracist-truther theory running around out there that the US DARPA project “HAARP,” which operates from a site in Alaska, is a major cause of earthquakes – and that it, or a related but super-whammadine-secret project, is actually a seismic weapon that Washington likes to turn on against recalcitrant nations, friend and foe alike.  (This Canadian expat, who incredibly was fired from Forbes some years ago and lives in Japan, reports that he has the goods on our use of the seismic weapon to extort Japan in 2008, and to sic China with the Sichuan earthquake in the same year.)

Ahmadinejad may or may not believe all that.  But believing it is not something we should put past him.  This is the guy who has railed against America for working to prevent the return of the Mahdi – an eschatological event that should not, in theory, be deterred by temporal resistance.  On his watch, Iran’s populace is being prepared for that return by a radio series on its imminence and meaning (first noted by Western media here).  Ahmadinejad is also, of course, a Holocaust denier whose own words, as well as those of his envoys, have promised destruction to Israel.  It would be invalid to characterize him as a skeptical, empirical, or mainstream thinker when it comes to the big questions of cosmology, theology, or politics.  Nothing in his public utterances would be inconsistent with credulity about conspiracist accusations against America.

If he did think the Pentagon capable of causing an earthquake in Iran, his sudden concern about that prospect would seem to arise from a fear that the US will want to attack Iran in the near future.  Michael Ledeen’s discovery, of the news item on Iran becoming a nuclear power in the next month, raises one possibility.  The traditional way of doing that is performing a successful nuclear detonation; if Ahmadinejad truly fears inviting an attack, that argues for an actual detonation, and not just the shelving of components for a “breakout” at a later date.

It may, however, just be that Iran will deem herself a member of the nuclear club when she has enriched uranium to the 90+% purity required to produce a weapon.  If we consider only the uranium the IAEA can account for, it seems unlikely that that could be accomplished in a month.  But as reported previously in this space, there is a growing pile of uranium we can’t account for in Iran.  The relevance of the IAEA inspection process has been steadily declining since late 2008, and today we are dangerously close to losing the bubble on what Iran’s doing.

Other possibilities weighing on Ahmadinejad’s mind include the long-impending delivery of the S-300 air defense system by Russia, which Israel would be motivated to attack before it was installed and operational, and the start-up of the nuclear reactor at Bushehr, now promised by Russia for August.  The latter need not be a pretext for attack; I don’t assess that either Israel or the US considers it one.  But Ahmadinejad may well suspect we do.

Whatever the particulars in this regard, another interesting news item bolsters the assessment that Ahmadinejad expects we will want to attack Iran sometime soon.  He met with Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Hizballah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in late February in what was described by regional press as a “war council.”  UAE’s The National quotes an Al Qods al-Arabi editorial:

“The timing of the meeting, the way it was undertaken and the ensuing press conference that was held at its conclusion, all point to a strategic coalition being reinforced. This is the build-up of a new front that will spearhead the confrontation with the US-Israeli alliance and whichever Arab countries that may, expressly or implicitly, be affiliated with it.”

Says The National [emphasis added]:

The Iranian president said he expects war to break out somewhere between spring and summer of this year. Meanwhile, the Hizbollah chief vowed to strike the Israeli capital, its airports and power stations if Israel dared to attack Beirut’s critical infrastructure.

Remember, this was back in February.  Israel wasn’t doing anything noteworthy at the time, and in fact, opinion was growing that Obama was distancing the US from Israel.  In February these lines looked like mere bloviation.  In April, however, with Syria having deployed Scud missiles with Hizballah, the February comments from Arab news media appear in a different light.  There’s more than one reason for Syria to give Hizballah Scuds, but the aggregate course of events certainly highlights the utility of Scuds in Hizballah’s hands for holding Israel at risk, if either Israel or the US mounts an attack on Iran.

In America, we are fully justified in asking rhetorically what could possibly induce Barack Obama to attack Iran.  We, unlike Ahmadinejad, are by and large making assessments on a relatively empirical basis.  But Ahmadinejad isn’t us.  Indicators are mounting that he thinks something is going to make even Obama the Bowing President want to attack.  The most obvious scenario would involve Israel considering it necessary to attack, because of developments in Iran’s nuclear program, with the US stepping in to counter Iran’s blowback (i.e., terrorism and attacks on shipping) and stabilize the situation.

Maybe we’ll do it with the Top Secret Humongoid Seismo-Giganteronic Monsterweapon.  See here for what the sky will look like in Tehran before the earthquake hits.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

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